


Dance Card

by Sab



Series: Dance Card [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: (Uploaded by Punk), All Love Is Unrequited, F/M, Flashbacks to College, Polish Boys You Were In Love With Once, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-11-05
Updated: 1999-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-03 09:03:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sab/pseuds/Sab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The road not taken. (Uploaded by Punk, from you guys are just fucked.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dance Card

**Author's Note:**

> This is a true story, sorta. I mean, it happened to me, not Scully, but I figured I'd plug her in to the game and see how she played it out. So that's where it stops being a true story, but those little snowy highways and dogwoods and mistakes do exist, ten, fifteen years later. Oh, and in answer to your question, yes, I did write another story with another guy Scully meets named Paul. It's a good all-purpose name; whatcha gonna do? Album and book publication dates verified with Borders.com, Amazon.com, and Cdnow.com, so they should all be correct. German translations c/o Altavista's Babelfish; let me know if they got it wrong. All "chalking" quotes copyright J. Wilson Kello, with whom I spent four years of college chalking. He is not Paul.
> 
> For Sister Phledge, whose kung fu is even better. Any typos and grammar mistakes that stuck around are mine and mine alone, despite her inimitable and unparalleled beta work. 
> 
> Also for Aurora Vere, who made me take a step back and remember that just because *I* know what I'm talking about doesn't mean the *reader* does, and that just because Paul is an arrogant fuck doesn't mean he's not a nice guy, too. Aurora, I know I made you stay up way past your bedtime helping me through this, and I owe you BIGTIME. ;)

"I'm grounded and rusty,  
My dance card is dusty now.  
Because I wanted to be  
What the angels see when they look down.  
Just a couple on the avenue  
With their feet on the ground."  
\-- Nanci Griffith, "Nobody's Angel"

 

The beds were foot to foot, not like real hospital cots, but like hospital cots in movies about insane asylums where people eat spiders and plan ambushes on nurses who wear little three-cornered hats. Only this was Katowice, Poland, and this was, by all accounts, a hotel. And there was clog dancing downstairs, and polka music tripping up through the rafters, and six feet of snow outside burying the car even as we slept. Or tried to sleep.

Paul was Polish. The beautiful Polish love of my life, I'd refer to him later, not knowing if I meant it. Warsaw was home for him, and we were on Christmas break. And he was my best friend. And he'd invited me. He'd picked me up at the airport in Warsaw exactly eleven hours before, nine of which we'd spent driving the little diesel car through what his mother called renaissance towns, what my mother would call quaint. What Paul and I called lunch, gas, dinner, gas, sweater, postcard, antifreeze. Krakow was beautiful, all klesmer bands and fur hats; Lodz we were too late for the theatre. Katowice was farther north than we'd intended to double back, but we'd taken side roads, sharing chips and cheap cookies, and we'd ended up here too tired and too cold to care. We listened to ABBA on the eight-track: "If you change your mind, I'm the first in line, honey I'm still free, take a chance on me," singing at the top of our lungs in the snow in the dark in cities where no one could understand us anyway. In cities that weren't even cities. Tomorrow would be a trek; ten more hours to Bratislava and then across the river into Austria; three hours after that, if we made it, in the dark, to Vienna. I was wearing his socks, guy-socks, thick-padded sports-socks, worn out in the heel but still warmer than anything I'd brought. I'd heard it wasn't sexy to sleep with socks on, but I didn't think that applied to Poland in December, and I was, again, too cold and too tired to care. 

"So let me ask you something," Paul said, cutting the darkness all mothball-reeking and historic. "And this has all the subtext you think it has." That part quieter.

I shifted on the sheets like burlap, trying to catch his expression in the light from the cars bouncing off the snow and into the window. Couldn't. It was amazingly, eerily, perfectly still and silent for all the polka music shaking the thick dark wood floor and walls. Or maybe vice-versa.

"Shoot," I said, tasting pillow, curling my knees and socked feet to my chest.

"Is it lonely, or is it refreshing, not having Nick in your bed?" he asked after too long a polka-filled pause.

I'd known it was going to be Nick he'd ask about, Nick who I'd left "stateside," as they say, to come out here and do Eastern Europe with this madman poet lying foot to foot with me on these hospital cots. Nick the musician. Nick of the strange hands and crying eyes. Nick who was waiting for me. But hearing the words tumble from Paul's lips terrified me, this invitation to make what I'd never admitted I wanted into reality. A terrible idea. A wonderful idea. A terrible idea. 

"It's refreshing not having _Nick_ in my bed," I said after too long a polka-filled pause, punching the name. I laughed, nervous, terrified. He laughed too. "And that has all the subtext you think it has," I said, emboldened by the dark. Was I really doing this?

"So what do you think?" he asked. I could hear him roll over onto his side, prop his chin up. I could imagine him staring down the length of both of our bodies at me.

What do I think? I thought I hadn't opted for the Polish midwinter road trip for the weather. I thought I hadn't left Nick at the airport with a cigarette and a smile just so I could return, ten days later, the same. I thought, staring down the length of my body, and his, into the black polka-filled void where his face was waiting, that this man, here, lying foot to foot with me, could be my chance. At happiness. At a normal life. At that love those greeting card people write about and those Woodstock-era bands sang about and those Erich Segal books spouted off about ad nauseum. I could do it; I could throw away everything good little Dana Scully had ever stood for and I could make love to this man here on sheets like burlap, here in Katowice in the coldest winter in forty years. 

"I think these beds are a little small. I think I'm really tired," I said. Later I would have no idea why. Later, much later, I would remember that night as my last and only chance.

The next day we held hands and ate hot dogs in the snow. We ducked flying bottles of champagne and shouted out in English, in Polish, in all the German we knew. We wore mittens and tucked them into each others' pockets, reaching for the wallet, the glasses, the cigarettes we'd put there. We raced down cobblestone streets surrounded by shouting, confetti, champagne corks going off again and flying, literally sailing bottles smashing against the wall of St. Stephen's Cathedral. Firecrackers went off and the crowd shouted "look out!" in German. We shouted back, racing, chasing each other in pea coats and scarves and collegiate bliss. That was Vienna, New Year's Eve, 1985. That was me, normal and happy and free.

*

"What's that?" Mulder asked without preamble, swinging into the office and hanging up his coat.

I sat at the desk, turning the cardstock over in my hands. "Captain and Mrs. Richard Hall are pleased to announce the marriage of their daughter, Jennifer Anne Hall, to Dr. Paul Wolarsky," I read aloud.

"Ah, another one bites the dust," Mulder said. "Old flame?"

"Mulder, no one says 'flame,'" I said, slipping the invitation back into its cream-colored, gold-embossed, calligraphed envelope. 

Mulder laughed, sidling up to the desk and leaning against it like John Wayne on a hitching post. "Med school?"

"College, actually," I said. "He's...I don't know what he is, now. GP, I think. Internist. He went to Cornell. His father was an optometrist, I think."

"And his birth weight?" Mulder tipped his head and eyed me wryly.

"You asked," I said, clearing my throat. "Never mind."

I flipped the envelope between my fingers one last time and tucked it into my bag. "So what's up?" I asked.

Mulder waved a piece of paper in front of me. "And the winner is..." he opened it with a flourish, "expense audits!"

"Jesus, again? It seems like we just did last year's!"

Mulder nodded. "We did. We're still two years behind. You, me, and Skinner makes three, wanted in front of the budget committee nine a.m. Monday, receipts in hand."

"Mulder," I said, furrowing my brow, "it's six o'clock. Why didn't you tell me about this this morning before we spent all day test driving pool cars?"

"Hey, I let you go home for lunch, didn't I? And come on, it will take your mind off Dr. Cornell, here." Mulder nabbed the folding chair from where it was leaning against the wall, and straddled it, facing me. He opened his datebook. "Besides, I just found the memo now. Now, where were we on January 2nd, 1998, how did we get there, and what did we buy?"

I settled back into the desk chair, exhaling between pursed lips. "There had better be coffee involved," I said flatly.

*

I was in the library wearing the glow of an orange bankers-lamp and sweatpants. Nick was at rehearsal, probably. I didn't really care. Paul slid in across the table from me. Midnight. Finals. Junior year.

"Chalking," he said, palms spread on the table, staring at me.

It was a noun, it was a verb, it was a midnight activity our little group had become accustomed to; we'd spook the campus.

"I have a paper due tomorrow," I said.

"Don't sleep," he said. "Come on; we don't have any chicks. You know you're the only female person who will do this with us."

Knew it and loved it; stroked that fact like a touchstone in my pocket, like a talisman. But he was walking away, now.

"Actually, don't worry about it," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow."

Could never show me he needed me, would never admit it, that man. 

"I'm coming," I said, stuffing "The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" into my bag.

Ali and Charles and Michael were already there, squatting on the flagstone walk, knees and palms chalky. I walked between them, reading the lines they were scrawling on the ground.

"I have run too hot and I have damaged things; I've slept on counterpanes made for kings. I have misled youths into wearing wings; fuck it, we'll see what tomorrow brings."

I kicked Ali, gently, and without looking up he tossed me a silver flask, which I caught, opened, and drank from.

"If I was right there, right now, I'd be the warmest dude in town," Michael had written. 

"What?" I laughed. 

"Exactly!" Michael said with solemnity.

"When I stretch for breath, I reveal my new tattoo," Ali completed. I gave him back the flask.

Paul grabbed the chalk from Charles. "Effervescent Pheasants!" He wrote triumphantly, chalk and bits of concrete on the heels of his hands.

"Write!" he said, tossing me a stump of white sidewalk chalk. 

I looked at the groud. Stupid to think so, but in Paul's eyes, all of me depended on what I did in the next thirty seconds. Was I creative enough to be one of "his"? Was I worthy of being the only chick rolling around past midnight with a bunch of drunk, hyperintellectual poet-types bent on showing off and making their albeit temporary mark on the campus? Was I Dana Scully, brilliant rebel, or was I simply Dana Scully, nice Catholic girl who would never take a chance, who was doomed to bear the cross of back burner, of second string, of poser?

Crack! Thunder lightning and the rain began. Two, three, four drops and the chalkings were washing away. Saved. It was pouring now, real live sky-opened-up storming, and cold, and glorious. Deus Ex Machina, abso-fucking-lutely, but I didn't care. We raced under the porte cochere abutting the parkinglot and collapsed in a heap, wet, laughing on a dry patch of driveway.

"Gimme," I said, flapping my hands in Ali's face. He handed me back the flask. I think it was scotch, or more likely cheap Bourbon but it was warm going down and my fingertips went numb as I drank. "Is this everything we have to drink?" I asked.

Paul opened his backpack and extracted a bottle of potato vodka with a paper label; handed it to me. I buried my face in his lap and he ran his fingers through my hair idly, took the bottle from me, took a drink.

It was balmy, despite the rain, dew-fog rising from the grass; thunder cracking. Bikes were tethered to concrete posts; from a dorm, somewhere, we could hear the strains of Pink Floyd's "The Wall." Dogwoods lined the flagstone path from the main building to the library; cherry trees down the quad were just budding. My shirt was wet and I was chilled despite the air, and oddly self-conscious of the fact that I wasn't wearing a bra.

I reached up and took Paul's hand, pretending that I wasn't. Ali clicked his tongue at me. "Want privacy, Wolarsky?" he asked.

Paul shook my hand free like he'd just noticed it. "What? No!"

Charles laughed. "Come on, dude," he said to Ali. "Justin brought back some kind bud from San Francisco. He's at Phi Psi painting flats, he said."

"I am so there!" Michael leaped to his feet and raced out into the rain.

"Scully? Wolarsky?" Ali turned to us.

I knew Paul would opt for safety in numbers, but I wasn't going to let him, not tonight, not here in the rain. We hadn't spent a minute alone together since Poland, and I wasn't losing this one.

"I'm not gonna go," I said, taking Paul's hand again.

"I am!" Paul said.

"Actually, I have to talk to you," I said, sounding lame, feeling like a camp counselor.

"Whatever," Ali said. He, Charles and Michael sped off toward the frat house.

"Give me a cigarette," I said. Paul did, put two in his mouth, lit them together, and handed me one. The filter was damp where his lips had touched it, and I took a drag, imagining smoke through his spit like bong water. I didn't want to let it go.

From his lap I looked up at him, all shaggy dark hair and cheekbones like ski jumps, the thin face of death. Since we'd returned from Europe things had been different, worse, better somehow. We'd had the unspoken understanding that we'd sleep together, and when we didn't, something little like a ball-bearing dropped. I'd had the unspoken intention of leaving Nick, poor, sweet, dumb Nick, and when I didn't, something that was supposed to snap stretched instead, all flabby and weak and dangling there like a clothesline between abandoned tenaments. But Nick loved me, even if he couldn't promise me perfect. 

"What's happening, here?" I asked, pulling myself from his lap and sitting crosslegged on the ground, our knees touching.

"What are you talking about?" he asked, too loudly, theatrically, almost.

"Why are you being so weird to me? Ever since we got back from Poland you've been weird."

"Come with me," he said. Leaving the bottle and his bag and the cigarette smoldering behind he grabbed me, almost too hard, and dragged me out into the rain. He spun like Mary Tyler Moore.

"Look," he said, clutching my shoulder and pointing through the clouded sky. "See it?"

"Paul, what are you talking about?" I asked.

"The Pleiades," he said. "Look!"

I didn't see anything, couldn't see anything through the thick layer of storm clouds, through the spring rain drenching us, didn't know how he could.

"Okay," I said, squinting. "So?"

He grabbed me again, by the shoulders, threw me down on the wet grass. "I love you, Dana," he said. "I love you."

Oh. My. God. "Okay," I said, trying to laugh, trying to shake him free, trying not to think about how muddy I was getting. His force terrified me; his vulnerability terrified me even more.

He let me go, ran off down the quad and I scrabbled to my feet and chased him. "Paul! Paul, come on," my voice was cracking, even here I was afraid to shout, afraid to make myself heard, and I murmured my calls after him, embarrassed for no good reason.

He stopped running.

"I love you," he said. "We should do this. It makes sense."

"You're probably right," I said, trying vainly not to analyze. I thought about Nick, about Poland, about calling Paul from my parents' house to ask him poker tips. I thought about sitting with him on the fire escape outside Laura's apartment, sharing a cigarette, making fun of freshmen. I thought about slipping out of bed when Nick was asleep and running to Paul's apartment, eating cabbage soup at three in the morning and watching reruns of Newhart on a jumpy TV. I thought about the day Caroline dumped him, the day he came to my house drunk with a tire iron and a six-pack of beer and asked me to come break things with him; I thought about our trip to the dump, shouting out to the heavens and breaking things, smashing things, coming home stinky and sweaty and triumphant. I looked at him, determined, he was determined, his jaw was set. He'd wanted to say this for a long time; so had I, though I'd never admit it. He wanted to say it in Poland; so had I. I was stilled, I was frozen, I was fucking terrified.

"Never mind," he said, taking me by the wrist and heading back toward the porte cochere.

I stumbled along behind him, stymied, stumped.

"Wait," he said, stopping in the dark on the edge of the quad. He pulled me to him, kissed me hard. I didn't move; my hands hung at my sides like empty sleeves. My world was a thousand possibilities at that moment, all of them dangerous, all of them horrible. All of them beautiful. All of them impossible. He let me go and I stared at him unblinking. My world took a snapshot, filed it away under "R" for rain and "K" for kiss and "M" for the biggest mistake I'd ever made.

"Fuck you," he said, softly. Then louder. "Fuck you, Dana. You're an idiot."

I probably was. Even then, I knew, I probably was. I thought about Nick, who would be coming home from rehearsal any minute now wanting fellatio and coffee. I was embarrassed for him, for his simple, stupid existence, for loving me; I was embarrassed for Paul for loving me, for hating me. I was embarrassed for myself for standing here, like an idiot, in the rain.

"I'm going home," I said, finally. And, as always, I had spent too much time analyzing, too much time overthinking, too much time coming to the wrong conclusions. And Paul was already gone.

*

There was coffee involved; lots of it. After the third trip Mulder just gave up and brought the whole damned coffeepot back to the office, plugged it in on the floor. It was nearing midnight and my eyes hurt from numbers.

"Where are we?" I asked Mulder, rubbing my eyes.

"Um..." he flipped through a stack of paper. "April. Almost halfway there." He pushed a sunflower seed through his lips with his tongue like a Pez dispenser, cracked it between his teeth and flicked the shell to the floor. Another seed from the depths of his mouth followed.

Was this what I had resigned myself to?, I wondered. This sunflower seed dispenser with the flip-top head? The wedding, Paul's wedding was tomorrow. I'd gotten the invitation nearly a month ago, RSVP'd "yes" and tabled it, didn't really believe it until today when I woke up and it was really the day before November 6th. My friend Laura had met Jennifer about a year ago at an art opening in New York, said she was "proudly displayed" on Paul's arm like a Kate Spade handbag. I wanted to hate her, but couldn't, at least, not more than I hated humanity in general.

I thought about the wedding, all the people in seafoam and cream and apricot chiffon with their patronizing rosebud smiles. I thought about the game I used to play in shopping malls when I was driven to their hellish gates for some birthday present or other. I'd pound the halls, ducking into stores, sworn to turn on my heel and leave the minute a salesperson approached me or spoke to me. "Leave me the fuck alone," I'd think to myself, like a mantra, as I entered. I would even laugh to myself at those poor wax-haired skater-kids at the Gap with their broad smiles: "hi, welcome to the Gap," they'd say so chipper I'd want to pound them, and I'd sigh, stop in place and hightail it out of there without so much as a nod. I can be a mean motherfucker; I can. Which is not to say I don't like shopping; give me J.Crew Dot Com any day of the week. It's people I can't stand, which occasionally leads me to believe I'm in the wrong line of work. Or the right one.

Mulder was staring at me.

"How long have you been staring at me?"

Mulder smiled, a rare kind smile, not that usual messianic smirk. "You look beat," he said, flicking another seed shell to the floor.

"I _am_ beat, Mulder," I said, probably too firmly. "Sorry. Can we just get this done?"

In an act that surprised me so much I nearly choked on my own tongue, Mulder reached across the desk and rested his hand on mine. "Are you going to go?" he asked.

"Go where?" I replied coolly, knowing what he meant, and knowing he knew I knew.

"To the wedding."

I sighed again - a lot of sighing - and took a long sip of cold coffee. "Probably not," I said. "I'll send a gift."

"Who was he?" Mulder asked. "And don't say optometrist."

I laughed despite myself. "His father was an optometrist," I said. "He's an internist in New York; NYU Medical Center."

Mulder spat a shell at me. "Fine, don't tell me," he said.

"It's not a big deal, really," I said, possibly lying. "He was a friend of mine in college. _Not_ a boyfriend."

"And therein lay the problem," Mulder clicked his tongue. "The road not taken."

I lifted my hand from under Mulder's, clapped it on the stack of papers. "Where were we in April and what did we buy, Mulder?"

Mulder shook his head. "I'm making more coffee," he said. 

*

Graduation. Those unflattering gowns and dangerous eye-poking caps sailing through the air, a pompous circumstance to the tune of "Pomp and Circumstance." I had dumped Nick very unceremoniously the night before under the auspices of medical school and distance and opportunity; he'd taken it well despite the crying: his. 

Paul I'd given a sweater, thick cabled wool turtleneck. The card had read "It gets cold in Ithaca. I love you. DKS." Paul had given me none other than Faust with an inscription in German I hadn't translated yet. "Zu vier Jahren des Tanzens angesichts der Pest."

Paul and his roommate Jesse threw a party and the lights went out, what would be a three day power outage for much of the county, I'd learned later. Thunder. Lightning. Paul and I avoided one another for no particular reason, mastering intense interest in our other friends. We smoked pot and played charades and read aloud from textbooks we'd never use again. At four thirty in the morning, when all the candles had burned down to swimming puddles of wax on the particleboard furniture, Laura threw a blanket at me and dove beside me on the couch.

"Nick left," she said.

"I know; I said goodbye," I said. "He's flying off to work on a lettuce farm in Hawaii in the morning. He's fucking insane."

"Everyone left," she said, gesturing to the room. Paul was lying on the floor on his stomach reading Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird" in Polish aloud to Sandy Lin and her boyfriend, who had taken two tabs of acid apiece and probably didn't realize they didn't understand a word he was saying, staring past him at the wax dripping from the candle stump on the bookshelf. Jesse was asleep in a chair. The record player hummed U2 "Under a Blood Red Sky," "Sunday Bloody Sunday." Laura kissed me on the cheek.

"I'm going to sleep in Jesse's room," she said. "Come get me if you need me. I love you."

"Love you too," I said, taking her cigarette and using it to light one for me. "I'll be fine."

I watched her stumble over half-packed cardboard boxes in the near-dark and disappear into Jesse's bedroom. The door swung shut behind her.

Sandy Lin's boyfriend made a valiant dive for the bathroom, hit the wall and collapsed to the ground. Sandy pulled him to his feet, laughing.

"We're leaving," she said to him, and to me, and to Paul. "We're leaving, I think."

"Don't leave!" Paul said. "This is our last night, we want to see the sun come up!" He was very actively not looking at me, and I smoked in silence.

Sandy Lin's boyfriend made it to the bathroom, and we could hear him retch. Sandy shook her head. "We're leaving," she said again. After nailing her shoulder into the wall where her boyfriend had collapsed moments ago, and with two or three false starts through the doorway, she left.

Paul sank to the floor, engrossed in his reading again. I lit another cigarette. The album ended and Paul got up, replaced it with U2's "War." "Sunday Bloody Sunday," again, the studio version.

I watched him for a long moment before speaking. 

"I should probably go to bed," I said, finally.

"We're not going to fuck, if that's what you were thinking," he said.

I buried my face in my hands. "That's not what I was thinking," I said. "I'm going home."

"Okay," he said, still reading.

"You're leaving the country tomorrow. Why are you doing this to me?" I asked.

"Listen, Dana. Sometimes people grow apart. It just happens," he said. "I'm sorry if that hurts you." I knew he was lying, and he knew I knew. I looked vaguely for an ashtray.

"Sure. Fine. Whatever," I said. I got up, tucked the blanket Laura had given me around Jesse's curled-up sleeping form, found my shoes, and put them on.

I hate goodbyes. I hate goodbyes.

"Give me an umbrella," I said. Paul, after some rummaging, handed me a newspaper.

"Or a newspaper," I said, trying to smile.

I hate goodbyes. I hate goodbyes.

"What time are you leaving tomorrow?" I asked.

"My flight's at ten," he said.

"You'll come by and say goodbye before you go?" I asked, knowing he wouldn't.

"Okay," he said, lying.

"I'll see you then," I said, lying.

I hate goodbyes. I hate goodbyes. Paul hates them too.

I went to hug him and banged my shin on the coffee table. He caught me by the shoulders before I fell.

"I'll see you then," he said, lying.

The newspaper didn't keep the rain out, and drunk I cried my way home. 

Later I translated the inscription he'd written in Faust. "To four years of dancing in the face of the plague," it read. 

*

The sun was coming up and the coffee was eating away at my empty stomach.

"I'm starved," Mulder said.

"Where are we?" I asked. 

"Antarctica," Mulder said with a weak smile.

"Jesus," I sighed.

Mulder looked at me, a long, deep, grey-eyed analyzing gaze. "Scully, you know what? I can finish this. Go home. You have a wedding to go to tonight."

I didn't know if that was true, but I liked the excuse.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Of course I'm sure," Mulder said. "Like, eighty percent of these expenses are mine anyway."

I had kicked off my shoes, and I felt for them with my feet under the desk, found them, and slipped them on.

"Get some sleep, Mulder," I said, pulling on my jacket and shouldering my bag.

I stopped at the doorway, threw back one last look at Mulder, ankle-deep in seed shells, his tight shoulders propped up on the chair back he was straddling, staring down at the reams of paperwork and receipts.

"Good night," I said, and exited down the hall to the elevator.

Up. I pushed the button and waited.

I had a wedding to go to tonight, didn't I? I hadn't seen Paul since graduation, hadn't thought about him much until tonight. That was a lie. I thought about him all the time, every time I heard German or Polish or "Love Story" came on TV. My road not taken, Mulder said. My one chance.

Paul had been my best friend for four years, and nothing had ever happened between us, and now, for the life of me, I had no idea why. I thought of snow, and Poland, and the straining sounds of European import music on scratched vinyl. I still had those records, somewhere. I still had Faust, somewhere.

How could I have done that? How could I have let my best friend, my soul mate, my one chance, go off and visit art galleries with his WASPy girlfriend like a Kate Spade bag?

I was an absolute blind fucking idiot. I was an adult; this was bullshit. Drawn to melodrama like I'd been in grade school, making up stories to tell the teachers to get the other kids in trouble. Once a narc, always a narc; I loved anything I could call a story. And here I was, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years later, Queen of the Unexplained, playing bitch to the gods of melodrama. Grow up, I ordered myself. The elevator dinged and I shot it the look I reserved for wax-haired Gap clerks, turned on my heel, and headed back for the office.

"Mulder," I said.

Mulder looked back over his shoulder, dark circles under his eyes. "What's up?" he asked.

"Come with me," I said.

"Oh, come on, Scully," Mulder said with a weak laugh. "Someone's got to explain the snowmobile."

"To the wedding," I said, my voice ringing out, singing against the walls of the office, crystal clarity. "Can you?"

"You really want me to?" Mulder asked. "Do I have to wear a tux?"

I dumped my bag, took off my jacket and sat down at the desk again. "Wear whatever the hell you want," I said with a smile that felt strange on my lips; a new smile. "Come with me. It's in New York. It will be fun."

"Scully, mind if I ask why?" Mulder squinted at me, looking for something.

"Yes," I said. "I mind." I was still smiling. "Now. Snowmobile. Let's get this shit done."

*

The Russian Tea Room has gold doors. Not outside, but inside, separating the only-vaguely-VIP hoi polloi from the "invited" in the private party ballroom. That much I remembered from the first time I'd been there, after a concert at Carnegie Hall, during college. The first and last time I'd been there. We'd been hoi polloi, then, Paul and Jesse and Laura and I, drinking tea with jam in it, watching people more important than we were slip past the padded booths through the gold doors. I didn't know what wonders awaited beyond the gold doors, but whatever it was, I knew, even then, it couldn't live up to the promise of the doors that marked it, tall and thick and gilded and important. Nothing could live up to the promise of those gold doors, then, in college, and nothing ever has. 

It was noon when I woke up; we'd finished the year's expenses by seven and I'd driven home through the grey November fog, against traffic, nauseated and groggy, my skin tight against my face, my lips dry, my eyelids thick like leather. It was no sunnier at noon.

Our train was at 1:15; it would get us into New York by five for the 6:00 wedding. I didn't even realize I was in the shower until the phone rang. I was in the shower, and didn't answer it.

Towel-drying my hair, I scrutinized myself in the mirror. What would he think of me, now, I wondered, wet and naked. Now, fifteen years later, Dana Scully, unmarried, unattached, a little haggard, a little wrinkled around the eyes, smaller breasts than when he'd known me, twenty pounds lighter. More conservative. I'd stopped smoking, for one thing, though today I wondered why. I imagined him, at this moment, in his apartment getting ready, nervous, his whole Polish family put up in hotels and inns out on the island. I imagined her, flushed with excitement and anxiety, dancing little-girl steps around the livingroom, her girlfriends pinning up the hems on their bridesmaids dresses, kissing her and giggling with glee. Somewhere there was a caterer, counting crudites. Somewhere there was a priest, getting on a train. Somewhere there was a band, smoking cigarettes, loading equipment in black boxes into a van and carefully folding their rental tuxes on the back seat. Somewhere there was Jennifer's mother, crying, Jennifer's baby sisters, if she had them, plucking rose petals into baskets. Somewhere there was a ring. In New York, somewhere, everywhere, there were people having brunch with their husbands, reading the paper, gossipping over bagels and coffee about how much the bride paid for that dress and how they couldn't wait to see it. Somewhere, everywhere, someone was thinking about Paul. And Paul, I would swear it if you asked me, was most definitely not thinking about me.

It was Mulder. The phone call that came in while I was in the shower, it was Mulder, he'd left a message saying he'd meet me at the train station, no need to pick him up, he was running late. 

Somewhere there was a wife in the Hamptons getting ready to take the train into the city; her husband helped her zip her dress and kissed her on the back of the neck where she was holding her hair up. I zipped my own dress. Straight, square-necked dark blue satin. I couldn't wear the silver choker I'd wanted to wear because one of the matching earrings was definitely very missing, so I settled for tried-and-true good Catholic girl pearls. Lipstick: Kiehl's Indian Red. Perfume scared me; it reminded me of grandparents and dead people, but I dabbed some to the insides of my wrists anyway. Then, deciding I smelled like the duty free shop at Heathrow airport, I washed it off. I stuck a chopstick through my hair, black lacquered with blue kanji inscription, and passed the mirror without checking. Paul was definitely not thinking about me.

Stopping by the door I wished, fleetingly, for the first and last and only time in my life, that I had a mink coat. Actually laughing aloud, I pulled on my long black trenchcoat, scarf, blue-beaded handbag. I was halfway to the car before I even thought to wonder, for no particularly explicable reason, whether I should have brought my gun.

Mulder arrived on the Union Station platform at 1:13; from the bench I watched him pound down the stairs and scan the crowd, looking for me. He'd greased his hair with something that made it stand up in little spikes across his brow, a look I'd never admit I liked on movie stars and would certainly never admit I liked on Mulder. I put him out of his misery.

"I'm over here, Mulder," I called, standing up. He pushed through the crowd toward me. He hadn't been joking, he wasn't wearing a tux, just a grey silk suit that looked suspiciously more Italian than I was sure he could afford. "Men's Wearhouse?" I said with a grin.

"I guarantee it," Mulder said, clicking his tongue.

It was cold, even semi-indoors on the platform, and I had my coat wrapped around me, the sash tied. Mulder wanted to look, I know he did, and he reached up like a child and touched the chopstick in my hair, gently.

"It's a good look on you," he said, simply. I was feeling reckless, and I opened my coat and did a pirouette. Mulder's eyes widened. "It's a very good look on you."

Had I thought about it, then, I would have noticed the warmth in his wide eyes, the admiration, the respect, the love. He was here, being dragged along behind me for this whirlwind tour of my past for no other reason than some sort of loyalty to me, some sort of commitment to protect me in the face of the plague, to brave with me any horrors I might have to endure. That had always been our commitment to one another, Mulder's and mine; like the buddy system in swimming we would always, instinctively, reach out an arm and say "don't drown. I'm here." Had I thought about it, then, I would have thanked him for it, told him just how much of my strength I owed to his presence. Strong as I was, however, I was thinking only of Paul, and didn't realize that it was Mulder who made that possible. Not to mention Mulder's approbation at my dress, at the chopstick in my hair that spared me the distraction of self-consciousness, and instead let me venture forth, I feel pretty, oh so pretty.

The train approached, thundering, shaking the platform and blowing my scarf out behind me, drowning out Mulder's next words.

"What was that?" I said as we boarded, looking for seats.

"I said, so tell me everything about these people we're going to go watch get married," he said, steering me down the aisle with a hand on my shoulder.

Something about the pilled polyester of the seat, or the grey afternoon speeding by out the windows, or the rhythmic cuh-chug, cuh-chug of the train on tracks, or Mulder's broad-shouldered proximity, though I'd never admit it, worried my guard down and I told him everything. It took four hours, and by the time we pulled into Penn Station at dusk I was either more ready, or less ready for this wedding than I'd ever be. I didn't realize, then, that Mulder had said uncharacteristically next to nothing for the duration of the ride, for the length and breadth of my story, that he'd shown next to no reaction to the emotional anecdotes I was spilling. He was silent, and I wasn't listening to it.

The church was full when we got there, bride's-side, groom's-side pews all filled with white folks, nameless, seamless white faces talking, laughing, introducing people who weren't really interested in meeting other people to people who weren't really interested in being met.

It took me a long moment to realize that that awful, piercing shriek was someone shouting my name.

"Dana!" Laura dove at me, beautiful as ever in her black beaded beatnik fashion, black hair cut angularly over a face just as angular, framed in cat-eye glasses. She threw her arms around me and I squeezed her tight, kissed her on the cheek. "I miss you so much," she said, stepping back and taking me in with a practiced gaze. "I miss you every day."

"You should call more often," I said with a smile. 

She turned on platform shoes. "You must be Mulder," she said, extending a hand with two or three chunky silver rings. "I know everything about you."

I noticed for the first time that her hair was delicately streaked with grey, and it made me a little dizzy. I hadn't seen her for two years or so, though we kept up through phone calls and the wonder of e-mail, but all this time she'd been the last vestiges of my youth, and here, at Paul's wedding, I found myself faced with the fact that it was really gone. Realizing how selfish that was, I twisted my face into a smile and turned back to her and Mulder.

"You okay with this?" she asked me, sotto voce, squeezing my hand. "This has got to be pretty weird for you."

"It's weird for me," I said, nodding.

"Mulder's a babe," she said. "If I swung that way I'd ask for his number."

"If you ask him, he'll say he can turn any girl around," I said, loud enough for him to hear me.

"What's that?" Mulder asked, gesturing with his head toward an empty pew. We followed him down the aisle.

"Oh, nothing," I said playfully, the knot in my stomach beginning to unravel, here with Laura's hand in mine. We sat down.

The organist was warming up, the church was tall and chilly. I willed myself to focus, listening idly to the conversation Mulder and Laura were having about the formerly-of-Cleveland Browns and the sorry state of Ohio without them.

In moments, Paul would be here, Dr. Paul standing beside his best man, whoever that was, waiting for his Kate Spade wife to be led down the aisle, flowers, dum-dum-da-dum. He would take her hand, they would turn their backs to us and shut us out and the priest would pronounce them man and wife, you may kiss the bride. By the power vested in me, I would be fine with it. I would be fine, here with my best, oldest friend and my partner on my arm. I would be fine. 

"Where's Jesse?" I asked Laura.

"He's in Japan," she said. "He called me yesterday and told me to give you a hug for him if I saw you. He didn't think you'd come. _I_ didn't think you'd come."

Someone – Mulder – rested his hand on my knee and gave it a squeeze. I put my hand on top of his and nodded at Laura. "I'm fine," I said.

"I get a lot of that from her," Mulder said to Laura. 

Somewhere a baby cried and was rapidly silenced. The crowd was shushing and I could have sworn the lights dimmed for a second. Quiet. Whispers. Giggles and coughs.

Paul.

Looking like he'd just stepped out of a fifteen year old photo, tall and willowy, dark and gaunt and wiry and beautiful. My stomach hurt, a sharp appendicitis pain and I swallowed hard, determined to watch every minute of him free, of him alone up there with every shred of passion I'd known him to have, every poetry-quoting doctor's bone in his body I'd never fucked, every drop of hyperintellectual collegiate soul windowed upon by inky-dark eyes. Paul.

He didn't even know I was here; he didn't care. We hadn't spoken in fifteen years; he'd forgotten me; he didn't care. He had his life around him, arranged in neat rows on wooden pews, his wife taking deep breaths behind a curtain somewhere, head between her knees, her father choking back tears.

The organist started the wedding march and I was the only person in the room.

Rose petals in slow motion, everything a girl dreams about when she's playing Barbie wedding at five, everything a girl is too ashamed to admit she still dreams about now. Jennifer Anne Hall. She looked like the late Carolyn Bessette, almond-shaped eyes like stars as her father in a Navy Captain's uniform led her down the aisle and I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry, and it wasn't until Mulder handed me a handkerchief that I realized that I already was.

They had written their own vows, and they read them in Polish and in English to one another, hands clasped.

Somewhere there were plane tickets to Aruba or Sydney or Florence; somewhere there was rice, and a car with tin cans behind it. Somewhere, later, there was a breakfast table, Mr. and Mrs. Wolarsky sharing lox and bagels and gossiping over the newspaper did you hear how much the Phillipses paid for that house? Somewhere there would be carpools, science fairs, halloween window painting contests judged by the owner of the local pharmacy. Somewhere there would be fights; someone would sleep on the couch. Somewhere there would be reconciliation; there would be make-up sex. Somewhere there would be career triumphs, there would be late-night hard liquor with the TV on mute. Somewhere there would be chinese takeout, there would be trips to the hospital in pajamas for a kid with a broken ankle, there would be trips to Mexico with a camcorder. There would be Christmas. Somewhere there would be new cars, and used cars, and yards with dogs. Somewhere there would be snow in the Berkshires, a bed and breakfast, a hand-knit quilt, arthritis. Houses would be sold. Kids would graduate. Somewhere there would be the quiet touch of his hand on hers as she sat on the porch with coffee at dawn, at sixty, at seventy, still gardening with a floppy hat to hide the grey. There would be ten thousand sunrises, and ten thousand sunsets. 

"I now pronounce you man and wife."

The organ stirred, the crowd stirred, cheering and laughing. Somehow turning to Laura was enough to make me think Mulder wouldn't see me cry. I bit my lip and forced a smile, wanting more than anything to put my fist through a wall, to run like Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate" to the altar, it should have been me, it should have been me!

If you asked me about Skinner and expense reports I would have had no idea what you were talking about. 

"Are you okay?" Mulder and Laura asked, nearly in unison. I sucked my cheeks.

"I'm _fine_ ," I said. "Let's get drunk."

*

The Russian Tea Room has gold doors and we went through them. Behind them was a reception room like any other, parquet dance floor over red and gold hotel-lobby carpet, round tables with an autumn theme, shocks of gilded fall leaves as centerpieces, pinlights lining the crown moulding.

I didn't talk during dinner, just knocked back girly drinks, anything pink with an umbrella would reclaim my femininity just fine, thank you very much. I fixated on the eighteen year old waiters and refused to let my eyes find Paul, even when the speeches were made and the toasts were made and friends of friends buzzed about the honeymoon. Mulder made small talk with the other people at our table but stole looks at me whenever he got the chance and I'd grin back evilly, my lips stretched across my teeth, the thin face of death.

I had no idea what dessert had been but I'd clearly finished it; my fork lay at a perfect four o'clock on a plate streaked with faint stripes of chocolate.

The other people at our table were up on the dance floor now; napkins were strewn near empty glasses, chairs were pushed back awkwardly like kids on the sidelines at sporting events. Mulder handed me a cup of coffee.

"Irish?" I asked, hopefully.

"Black," he said. I drank it anyway.

"I want to meet him," Mulder said, finally.

I turned to him, something like shocked. "Why?" I asked. Had I thought about it, I would have known, should have known all along what it was that brought Mulder two hundred miles on a train with me to watch my heart get ripped out, but of course I hadn't thought about it, then, clouded by bouquets and some sort of dessert.

"Because he's clearly important to you, and you've avoided him since we got here, and I think it's a fine excuse for you to go talk to him. You can introduce me as your boyfriend, or your husband, or whatever the hell you brought me here to pretend to be."

My hands went numb for no good reason. My stomach churned. "What?" I asked, a little too loudly.

"Come on, Scully," Mulder said. "I know you brought me here so you wouldn't show up alone to this thing. And I don't mind, but I think if you're going to do it you should do it."

From the dance floor, I could hear Paul laugh.

He was jealous? My radar was admittedly dull but that's what it sounded like, possessive, protective jealousy behind Mulder's voice. "Jesus, Mulder," I said, throwing down my napkin. It didn't make the satisfying crashing sound I'd sort of hoped it would make, but my head was clouded anyway and I rose to my feet shakily. "Fuck you."

Laura intercepted me halfway across the dance floor. "They're leaving soon," she said. "Do it now, babe."

I waved her off, struggling to shake the stupor from my brain. Paul was alone, blessedly alone, leaning against a bass speaker and watching Jennifer dancing with her father to something possibly Righteous Brothers. I was on a mission. I clacked through couples across the dance floor to his side.

"Hey Dana," he said, reaching out to touch my arm. "Sorry I haven't come talk to you. I've been," he waved a hand, indicating the room, "kind of preoccupied."

Of course he would make this about him. Of course it was him who hadn't come talk to me, not the other way around. I looked up at him squarely. "Congratulations," I said. "She seems great."

"She is great," he said, beaming. "She's so smart, Dana. She's a philosopher."

What? She's a philosopher? No one is a philosopher! "What the hell does that mean?" I asked, sounding more snide than I'd really intended.

"She's a neo-Hegelian theorist. She just finished her dissertation and U of Indiana's putting it out this summer. You should talk to her about quantum theory; she has some really interesting thoughts on it from a philosophic perspective."

I'd forgotten what a pretentious fuck he was. "Okay, sure. I'll talk to her about that," I said.

He smiled with his mouth, his eyes steeped with something like false soulfulness. "It's good to see you," he said. "How have you been?" He asked it the way you'd ask a dying person, or someone in mourning. I realized, with horror, that in a way I was both. But he didn't know that. He didn't know anything about me.

"I'm fine," I said. "I'm great."

"Where are you practicing these days?" he asked.

"I'm not practicing," I said. "I work for the FBI now."

He nodded like he understood something. "That's okay," he said. "That's probably interesting for you."

"Probably," I nodded.

"Look," he said. "I know this is hard for you, Dana. But it's been fifteen years. You really have to get over me."

Oh. My. God. I nearly laughed in his face. This was what I'd been worried about?

"I'll try," I said sarcastically, my eyes wide. "Are you serious?"

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to imply anything. You just looked upset, that's all."

"I assure you, I'm very happy," I said, trying to stop myself from defending my life even as the words tumbled out. "I have a great life. I've seen things most people can't even dream about."

"Good for you," he said, drawing out the yoo-uuu the way you do when you congratulate a kid for using the potty. "That's great."

"And you're happy?" I asked, anxious to steer the conversation.

"I am," he said. "Happier than I've ever been, in some ways. Jennifer's terrific."

"Good," I said. The music changed, a fast song now, upbeat, something Fifties-ish.

"Are you seeing anyone?" he asked. "I noticed you brought a date."

He noticed. "He's my partner," I said. "My FBI partner."

"That's okay," Paul said. "Before I met Jennifer I spent a whole year alone."

"Wow," I said. "A whole year. And you're still alive."

Now we weren't even pretending not to squabble. "Have you heard from Nick?" he asked.

"Not in fifteen years," I said.

"It's hard," he said. "Jennifer and I...we're soul mates, really. It's amazing. She knows me better than anyone ever has."

Better than I ever did, he meant. 

"When you find that," he said, "it's overwhelming. You don't even realize it until you're in there, in the trenches. 'In love,' like love's a place. Jennifer and I were friends for two years before we realized we were in love. Something just clicked."

"I'm happy for you, really," I said, gently. "It's nice to see you happy."

"It's nice to see you...too," he said, weakly. "We have a flight to catch, and I've got about five hundred people to say goodbye to, so I should go," he said.

"Go," I said.

"You can always call me, Dana," he said.

"Good to know," I said. Without looking back, I departed across the dance floor to where Mulder was sitting, watching me.

"How did it go?" he asked, when I got back to the table.

"He's an arrogant fuck," I said, collapsing in the chair.

"Congratulations!" Mulder said genuinely, a big smile crossing his face.

I looked at him, met his eyes for real for the first time since we'd boarded the train a lifetime ago. He was with me, feeling this with me, riding this terrifying wave along with me every crashing, nostalgic, humiliating step of the way. He was right here next to me, where he'd always been, where for granted I would take that he would always be. 

"I didn't mean to blow you off," I said. "I was preoccupied." Yup, just like me, making it about me, assuming that would excuse everything.

"Come on, Scully, I must have told you that being slapped around turns me on," Mulder screwed up his face into a teasing grin.

Paul and Jennifer were leaving; there was a smattering of applause and some gilded leaves in the air as they pushed their way through the big gold doors to that life of kids and gardening and normalcy I'd never have, and didn't really want. Everything happens for a reason, they say, and where science meets faith I'm inclined to agree, especially here, especially now, not even wondering where Paul was off to, and instead, finally, taking stock of what I had in my life right here, right now. 

I looked at Mulder, who had taken my hand and was trying to find something behind my eyes I think I'd misplaced with that silver earring. "Dance with me," I said.

"I thought you'd never ask," he said. He stood up, extended his arm to me and led me to the dance floor.

My cheek against his chest I could smell him, familiar Mulder-smell, all sweat and cheap aftershave. His hands were broad against my back, and warm, and comforting, and familiar.

"She's a philosopher," I muttered, wryly.

"What the hell does that mean?" Mulder asked.

"That's what I said."

He held me to him and we rocked on shaky feet to the music, swaying in tandem, always in tandem, movements matched perfectly by counter movements.

I pulled him to me more tightly and he kissed the top of my head, cradled the back of my neck with his hand. Somewhere Paul and Jennifer were in a taxi, now, going somewhere. Somewhere around us married couples were checking their watches, calling the sitter, making their civil goodbyes. In the city, all around us, families were sleeping, couples were fighting, things were being thrown. People were living out their banal, beautiful lives all around us, but tonight, I didn't care. Not here, on the dance floor, with my partner, my best friend, my only friend, everything that was my life that mattered. This was my life. The past was gone, and gloriously so; I wouldn't take back a minute of it but I wouldn't relive it if you paid me. This was my life, now.

There is no such thing as the road not taken.


End file.
